Here's your parade…

Vignettes

You said you never thought our story was good enough to publish.
Nobody would read it anyway.
You’re right, that nothing spectacular happened.
Nobody died. Nobody left.

I didn’t even cry.

There was nothing monumental in our love affair.
I wasn’t swept off my feet. You didn’t fall head over heels.
It was not a fairy tale and it ended all too suddenly to make a fuss about.

You said you never wanted to be epitomized in a few simple words. You were far too complex to be explained. No character could do you justice. That’s one trait I chose never to accentuate in my depiction of you, your complete belief that no one could peg you.

And I always regretted how we went our separate ways. I always wondered what it would be like to love you, all of you, for more than a flicker of a moment. So I rewrote our story with just a change of facts. Just so I could know.

Because every letter I ever wrote, every word you ever spoke has found a place in the history of our intertwined hearts. And while you weren’t the man of my dreams, my knight in rusted armor, and obviously not the love of my life, you were all these things and more in fiction.

We would fall in and out of love a thousand times. Meet in different places. Exchange different names. It’s happened so many times in words, but not once in reality. Don’t you know? It’s always our story, just with different pronouns.

It may seem like a silly way to hold onto you, reliving our time through idealistic transgressions and hopeless desires, but of all the things you took from me I am thankful my imagination was never ripped away. Because in that way, which you might never truly know, I got you exactly how I wanted you.

I sat up all night waiting for this to be a dream. Or a joke. Or something other than what it was. Relationships don’t just end in three paragraph emails. You simply can’t disappear on me. It’s not fair.

I am not a business transaction you can just end on a whim. Especially not after you tell me you’re in love with me. Because you realize that’s kind of a MAJOR PLOT POINT. Because yes, we are a long story. There are plenty of twists and turns and an absurd rising action but very little resolution.

And you changed everything. So excuse me if I need a moment to gather my thoughts on the matter. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you sooner, but you see I had other matters to attend to, such as:

-Finding an attorney to help me voice my own guilt in our transgressions
-Condemning us both in verse. (Of course you’ll get none of the proceeds to the endless books I could write on our tumultuous love affair)
-Buying wool socks to keep my feet warm after you vanished from between my cold sheets

Oh and I forgot to vote because of you. Not that my opinion holds much weight in any election when you’ve just decided to run off and spill my secrets to the press that I’m a bad person, who actually likes to keep some things to herself to avoid the paparazzi and its starving lust at devouring what little I had to begin with.

And you think this is about you.

Bullshit. It stopped being about you the moment you stepped off that plane and came crashing into my life expecting me to love you. Just like that. Really though…I’m a mess in comparison. So don’t you treat me like I’ve made any plans to haunt you when I’ve got plenty of ghosts following me.

I’m sorry I didn’t live up to your expectations. But at least I’m still here, fighting. Even if it is in poetry. At least I’m here. Where as you are gone. Fucking coward.

It’s been a long time since the idea of calling you up has crossed my mind as tears spill down my cheeks. It almost took my breath away. How strange to remember what that feels like. Back when the sound of your voice soothed the aches and pains. Back when your words attempted to heal the minor atrocities that felt like the end of the world to me. Back when you were all I needed.

Back when…

It’s been a long time since ‘back when’ was something I never had to ponder. Whodathunk I’d ever have to? I certainly didn’t. It only makes the tears sting a little sharper as they fall. Because I’d like to call you up, because the you that I’d like to speak to would offer up some laughter filled neosporin and a love stuck band-aid to keep all the germs away. The you that I’d like to call would fix me, to the best of your ability.

Back when…

It’s been a long time since you were the you I’d like to call at 2am. But it’s been a long time since I was the me that would call you at 2am. Funny how that works…But it makes me wonder, what would happen if the me that I am, called the you that you are–just something to think about I guess. It is getting close to our meeting time anyway…

Back when…

It’s been a long time since we first met. That was fun, wasn’t it? You were you. I was me. Those first few days were great, don’t you agree? But that was back when, and this is now and we don’t talk anyhow you see it, it doesn’t matter how it goes around. It always comes back around doesn’t it? Except then, I’d be back in love with you. That’s never made much sense to either of us. That whole ‘not so much in love with you as I was used to’

Back when…

It’s been a long time since a lot of things, especially me wanting you. That’s something I’ve forgotten how to do. Except, I didhave the urge to call you. Which is new. At least since ‘back when’ came into existence in our lives. Obviously I didn’t follow through. I’ve always been good at fighting off those resounding urges. Because it went through my whole body, from head to toe–>”call him” But I didn’t. for subtle reasons even I’m not sure I understand.

Back when…

It’s been a long time since I knew how to talk to you. Since I was fearless in confessing everything within me. I’m out of practice and some times I just prefer to remember you as someone else that I used to know, who’d save me from myself. Those late night rescues back when we knew what we wanted but didn’t fight for it. Back when we fought to keep the things we never knew we needed. Back when calling you up was an urge I always heeded.

Back when…

It’s been a long time since, well, back when. So much is different and yet it seems the same. At least most moments before you came around. And then there is 2am. That feeling has come back around, it looks different now after all the carnage and the resilient sounds of silence. So much so I almost wrote it off, but there’s nothing like a momentary art such as yearning for the days we used to share and the nights we used to love. Or is it the other way around? I can’t seem to remember anymore…

Neither wanting too much, nor needing too little. Except that everything that seems important is hidden away, too secret for me to discover. And everything that I think to be so trivial is all my eyes are able to capture behind my corneas. My heart can’t comprehend your absence in my sight. Now all it can feel is what’s like not to feel.

Those tempered moments of fluid respiration you used to inspire in me have vanished. Although I’m beginning to wonder if you were ever here in the first place, or if I’d just imagined your laughter in my ear. Because it seems my imagination has truly gotten the best of me lately as I follow superfluous ideas of you and me walking hand in hand in the chilly autumn air. And I can’t shake the feeling of your arms around me.

This is what writing has done to me. I’ve lost myself in fantasy. Because clearly you do not exist, except in my self-destructive memories of things that have never happened. We have never met, and I cannot begin to recall your name as it has never danced along my tongue. None of what I’d thought has come to be reality. I always hoped it was a self-professing prophecy. I’m not so sure anymore that I have the power to make my own future based off fairy tales and Hollywood endings. Real life isn’t like that.

Fiction likes to tease me in my loneliness. Skipping around me, singing “na-na-na-na-na, you can’t catch me.” Apathy has taken over romanticism and put it to shame at ever trying to prevail. Cynicism and bitterness have come along to shelter my fragile heart from the rainstorm of almosts and indefinite maybes. Fiction taunts me. All the time. Don’t think me a fool in the gravity of the situation that leaves me alone in cold sheets at night.

My damage control is faulty. Some pieces of me are irreparable and I’ll never be the same after this. He should know that. I do. I know that he can’t fix me. He won’t even try. But he thinks he can fill me up, remold me from the inside. And I hesitate, because I know I’ll still feel empty. Maybe even more so than before. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t even try. And yet he whispers to me, is everything alright?

No it’s not. I’m not okay most days. I know how it sounds. And some days, it’s exactly how it sounds. Like today, when I’m waiting for someone who might never show up, when I’m hoping that he’ll call and whisper how he can fill this emptiness up, knowing that it will never work the way we’d like it to. You see, I know these things, but I find them hard to believe anyway.

Possibility has always been my vice, a temptation all too sweet not to taste. Yet it always leaves my heart bitter and sour–incapable of wholeness, as others take a souvenir and go along their way to visit other monuments and make them incomplete–yet giving more to those who pass by than keeping any of it to myself until I am a shell of who I was, except I’m not sure I know who that was anymore.

So to me, you will always be fiction. As fiction will always be just beyond my reality. Because even reality fools me. And I will succumb to giving myself to the man who I know will never love me, just for the chance to feel something. Because the idea of something, is better than nothing. That is what this emptiness has taught me.

I wrote you a letter today. It said everything I needed you to hear, in the most perfect way. The t’s were crossed, the i’s were dotted–all in my fervent cursive hand. The words flowed out so easily that I almost couldn’t fathom setting them free.

I wrote you a letter today. A confession of my deepest thoughts, a revelation of all the possible plots. I arranged it just so–no rhyme, but lots of rhythm to sooth your soul. The sentences pieced together, like a finished jigsaw puzzle of my scattered heart.

I wrote you a letter today. It was pretty, yet simple. Not generic, nor excessively chatty. I reminded myself plenty of times not to get carried away. And I signed it off with a quiet flourish–an offer of my love and good wishes.

I wrote you a letter today. You would have liked it if I had sent it. Because, of course, this isn’t that same letter that was written so diligently–so amorously. You might have noticed the imperfections, the discombobulation of sense that I sometimes feel.

I wrote you a letter today. It said everything I needed you to hear, but then the wind in the park it blew away. And I couldn’t catch that single sheet of paper I had left my heart on. So I thought that maybe it was meant to be–for us to go along as we are–to just be you and just be me.

I wrote you a letter today. It was not perfect. My grammar still needs some work. My cursive is a little sloppy. I might have misspelled some words in all my haste. Just don’t hold it against me. Try to read between the mistakes–although they are abundant–I had the best of intentions to write you the loveliest letter…only to find there is no perfection in pouring ones own heart out onto the page.

It’s getting late where your soul resides. Oh how I wish to lay myself beside you in the tumultuous sheets of paper that hide in every crevice of my room, in drawers, corners, and trash bins. Our love would be ink stained lullabies, rhyming with the sweet and low sugar you pour into your coffee every morning on your way to working full time at feeling alive.

My skin, sunburned and itching to be submerged in the warm raptures of your eyes, velvet pools of blue ocean mystery. But you still won’t wake. What plays on the back of your eyelids when you fall asleep? I’d love to see. Because I know you dream in extremes. I hear you murmur melodies of aspirations, and I lose respiration at the sound.

I strip down to the bare essentials, scantily clad with invisible tattooed memories of hours staring at the night skyline retreating into dark shadows of dreams I cannot recall. My heart is hot on the trail of missed opportunities ignited by a snowstorm in the middle of July. And I’d chase you around the world to get the answers to unasked questions of faith and how to fish meaning from the ocean of this life.

Why do I wonder if you’re real? Or just something for which my heart would like to feel? So many times I thought my head was teasing me with words, words I think I’m supposed to say or hear, just to fill the silence between the poundings in my chest. But the interruption seems to be too much and no amount of sleepless nights waiting up for peace of mind will satisfy my urge to fall asleep in your embrace.

I’ve spent the better part of the last three weeks arguing with the music on my ipod and spent the rest of it praying that the battery would die right after Portions for Foxes had reclaimed my self-confidence to miss you and before Gravity could pull me down into a funk of the acutest regret-both great songs, though altogether so in tune with you I might have to change the keys.

I was using the music to crawl back inside you-or at least the parts of you that I still had the chance to cling to since you disappeared from everywhere except my own head, but that’s where you’ve always lied, feet tangled up in mine and quiet air escaping your lips. Too far away to touch, too close for me to comprehend. I occupied my hands trying not to change the songs as they went idly by on shuffle. The parts of me I wished to give you, but kept locked up inside struggled to be Free, knowing that you’d only throw it in my face that I even took the time to mourn you. My mind was still to the playlist my ipod insisted-Throw Me a Rope fades as the World Spins Madly On and the wilting butterflies in my stomach became unsettled In Your Atmosphere.

You entrenched the soundtrack in my head, waltzing in and out, but mostly in- just to torment the shoulda coulda wouldas of my heart. I’ll admit that I was running. For so long I chased after you, hoping this could be a start. I got my hopes up. I went after what I wanted. Isn’t that what you always said to do?
Songs continue to invade my mind, knowing from the beginning you were never mine to have-yet wanting you anyway. Desire is a tricky thing. So apparently is honesty. Sympathy dragged me down, aware that you had none for me. I still love to hate how Everything Changes reminds me of how you never really said goodbye.

You’ve got me stuck in The Saltwater Room containing all my misery. I’m sure that you believe that’s where I belong, and it’s possible that I agree. And I can’t help that Maybe, given time you might forgive me for the things you never let me say, the facts you never asked to hear before you left me to Cry for You. Because I did-the instant that you left.

Our opinions on the matter may be different-but I’ll agree to disagree on how we end. I still love you, even though you may want me to burn in hell. Just so you know, with everything we’ve been through, one fact remains true…I Will Follow You into the Dark.